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As a startup founder, my time -- and that of my co-founder (Plastiq’s Head of Product, Daniel Choi) -- is often pulled in many different directions. We have to be savvy and smart about how we spend our time, as Daniel recently figured out for himself after having to reduce his work hours to recover from a harrowing stint at the hospital, while also fitting the same productivity of his typical 18-hour work day into his new schedule. That is what inspired this article, and below are some of the most effective tools and techniques we both use to be more productive and efficient.

Ask yourself three simple questions to help prioritize your time.

As the founders of a company, we frequently find ourselves caught in a swirling sea of partnership deals, feature launches, strategic planning and pretty much anything else you could imagine. To ensure we spend our time wisely, we have a simple process for determining whether an initiative deserves our attention. We assess each possible priority against the following three factors, in order:

1. Alignment: Are we aligned with how something is being approached? If yes, we let our colleagues handle it. If no, we move on to question No. 2.

2. Impact: How much will the outcome matter to the business? If it is a lot, we get involved. If it's not much, we let our colleagues handle it. If it's a moderate amount, we move on to question No. 3.

3. Persistence: How long will we have to live with the ramifications? If it's less than a month, we generally let others handle it. If it's longer than a month, we generally get involved.

Persistence is perhaps the only factor listed above that warrants a definition. It refers to how long we’d have to endure the consequences of whatever happens. High-persistence items include structural work, like contracts and software development. These form foundational scaffolding upon which much else is built, and so the legacy of our choices will endure to a greater degree. On the other hand, low-persistence items include digital marketing and copywriting; if they don’t work, it’s relatively trivial to switch them out with few consequences.

The right people can multiply one’s productivity.

In the early days of Plastiq, it was difficult to trust others with mission-critical work. After all, starting a company is the epitome of the phrase, “Fine, I’ll just do it myself!” As the saying goes, however, it takes a village to raise a child, and we quickly found ourselves falling behind as the breadth of our operation grew exponentially.

It didn’t help that we also hired people we shouldn’t have. That's not to say that these individuals were incapable, but we found that our instincts would often lead us in wildly different directions. This meant that we had to spend most of our time just keeping everyone aligned, instead of being freed up to tackle more problems.

For a long while, Dan and I thought that this was simply the nature of management: that it was unrealistic to wish for a team that instinctively moved as one. But good fortune (and tough times) would eventually prove us wrong. During a financial squeeze, we ended up having to scale back our team, and with our skeleton crew, we made magic happen. With a third of our original headcount, we were fivetimes more effective.

We learned to leverage our bodies’ natural rhythms.

My co-founder is not exactly a morning person. Still, he would drag himself into the office before dawn, because he firmly believed “there’s always something to do.” Late evenings would often find him fighting back exhaustion to continue burning the midnight oil.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this pace eventually took its toll on his physical and mental well-being, and many of his relationships -- both personal and professional -- suffered as a result. In retrospect, sixteen years of schooling had taught him how to sprint with the best of them, but unlike a university schedule, business-building didn’t come with built-in breaks. So, he found himself sprinting through one project, only to immediately start sprinting again with the next.

It took six years, but his health eventually broke down and he nearly bled to death from increasingly severe ulcers. He left an extended hospital stay with his most valuable lesson: Productivity is meaningless if it’s not sustainable.

These days, I get to learn from his experience. We both make time for rest and sleep, and we pay attention to what our bodies tell us. We devote our most important tasks -- information synthesis, brainstorming, collaboration, decision making and more -- to hours when our mental acuity reaches peak performance.

Looking Ahead

We’ve learned a lot since starting the company. As the magnitude of the tasks at hand has grown, so too have the obligations on our time, and we know we will have to continue to evolve our approach to keep pace with Plastiq’s acceleration.